Breaking Wind:

Where there is a Will-

There is a Berkeley Lawyer: Being a Refutation of Phillip E. Johnson

 

The Story of the Canon Rev. Dale Owen and His Discovery of Darwin

 

I confess to having had doubts about Darwin. He seemed very Victorian. There is almost nothing to like about the Victorian era. Or science as it is practiced in this hegemonic age. Science is dominated by white males. So I had my doubts about Darwin. However, I never liked it. Such doubts seemed uncomfortably close to religious fundamentalism. So I had doubts about my doubts, but at last I have found Darwin and Darwin’s God.

 

It had to happen.  For months now it has been evident that my doubts of Darwin were a betrayal of faith.  It came first in moments of doubt in my doubts, when I would pick up Howard Van Till’s brilliant, “The Fourth Day.”  I would thumb through its pages and mutter, almost mindlessly mutter, “He is right, you know.”  It was the absolute simplicity of the main idea that wore me down.  Purposeful down to the very terminology, the book screamed at me with an almost nominalist precision and care for language:  creaturely capacities, creationomic structures.  Was it the other Johnson, Samuel, who said, “He who coins the most adjectives wins?” As Bob Dole once put it, “Whatever.”

 

I tried to pass it off.  And for a long while I was able to do so.  Then over the electronic wires, humming into my virtual mail box, like a scud missile moving in to destroy my false beliefs, came the Book.  Ken Miller’s powerful book: Finding Darwin’s God. Written by a biologist, a religious one to boot, it challenged my authority to say anything about evolution.  I am not a Scientist.  I do not understand Science.  In fact, due to my lack of knowledge about Science, my choice of Scientific Authorities had gone wrong.  What can be said to such a charge? 

 

It is, of course, true.  Have I ever gone to meetings of the National Center for Science Education? Have I ever worn a white lab jacket?  Have I ever mastered saying, “I am religious, a scientist, and I believe in Darwin?” Never.  My understanding of arguments is limited by failure to make my religious robustly submissive to the Spirit of our Age, like Miller. 

 

The case is plain:  To understand Science, you must do Science.  To do Science, you must be a Scientist.  To be a Scientist, you must think Scientifically.  To think Scientifically, you must think as other Scientists do.  QED I have not thought as Scientists have Thought.  Methodological naturalism, God’s means of securing the truth of theism in a Scientific age, has escaped my notice.  When it was revealed to me, with the cunning and the deception of fundamentalism that even I cannot avoid, I attempted to escape.  It cannot be done.

 

American evangelical culture has failed.  It has failed, because. like me, it has continued to do battle against evolution.  Some evangelical colleges are waking up to this fact. How it galls me to admit that they are more progressive than I, but truth it true and must be said!  They are throwing off the old ways and facing the new age and the new person boldly.  Must I lead the Church back to the past?  Can’t Americans, too vain and proud to see, adopt the pattern of the European Church?  They embraced evolution.  There was no fundamentalist reaction there.  If the churches seem a bit empty, that is a small price to pay for peace in the laboratories.  It is better to have one don at Cambridge than one hundred plumbers crowding the pews with their opinions and folly.  This is not elitism.  That one don will be able to educate the mass of plumbers and housewives in the Methods of Science.  This is already being done in England and other places.  There anti-intellectual Churches are empty.  The Church of England has embraced the laboratory. If it too seems empty, that is an illusion.  The emptiness is the best sign that, in their hearts, the people are there!   Do not try to squeeze the real commitment of people into what people merely APPEAR to be doing.  This is bad reasoning.  One ends up with people only in the gaps where investigation has not been able to show they are not. 

 

During the transition it appears that all the Churches are empty, but this will not last forever.  Soon, everyone will see, the plumber will see and the don will see that in the New Understanding of the Faith, that the laboratory just is the cathedral of the New Dispensation.  The Holy Spirit moves where He wills and sometimes, He comes and fills the man or woman in white jacket to utter truths so profound that they cannot be understand by most of us.  Who can hear the words, “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” and not recognize in them the same Divine Inspiration that allowed John to write, “In the beginning was the Word. . . “

 

How precious our Faith is to us!  How marvelous its truths!  How I have confused the issue and refused to see what my friends at Christian Colleges, at Zygon, and in Science have tried to show me.  But if I have any appeal to make for charity, it is that certain people, a fifth column within Science, deceived me.  Wells, Dembski, Behe, Meyer, Wiester, and Schaefer.  They seemed like Scientists.  Quisling seemed Norwegian. 

 

How could I make such an error?  Have pity on me Gentle Reader, one of them had even been nominated for the Nobel.  I have seen Behe toying with beakers in a room full of humming machines.  I confused their science-like actions for Real Science.  The distinction was simple, so simple that even I could miss it.  These “friends” were not engaged in Science at all, but pseudo-science.  Their papers might have been published in real journals and they might work at real Labs, but their hearts are not pure.  They have, for personal gain and out of fear of the future, betrayed Science.  They no longer think Scientifically.  And a true Scientist is what he thinks.  The true Scientist is not one who plays with chemicals, children do that.  The true Scientist, as we have seen, knows how to think Scientifically.  If I have papers in a peer reviewed journal, and think not naturalistically, I have merely broken wind.  If I work in a lab and wear a pocket protector, and see irreducible complexity in biology, then I am a rude noise at a great party.   If I give all that I have to experiments and am nominated for the Nobel, but fail to reason like a Sagan, then I am nothing.  Less than nothing.  Three things abide:  God, Scripture, and Methodological Naturalism.  But the greatest of these is Methodological Naturalism.  For it is by It that we come to see clearly the truth that of the Hidden and Unseeable Face of God.

 

We must not place the actions of God in gaps where they may be exposed as No Action.  Instead, we must place God’s actions in the places where they do not appear to be.  To the true Scientist and the true Christian, it is most sensible to see the hand of God where evidence would say the hand of God has not been.   To be precise: God acts where He does not Act.  There is great mystery here.  One treads on it at one’s peril.  I have done so.  I repent.

 

And so this little response is to retract everything.  The Phillip Johnson phenomenon, Intelligent Design, has haunted me.  Behe and company have infected me. I have been a fundamentalist, though I have fought fundamentalism all my life. All counts for nothing for I failed to give my all to Evolution.  I am only Duane Gish dressed up in a Berkeley robe.  I am Henry Morris.  It is a great horror to me to say it, but it must be said.  Evolution is true. Science is the means to know the Truth.  And the Truth has set me free.  My books have been a bad odor released on a hapless Church.  May no future generation inherit that wind.  May the Churches, like those of Europe, empty into the pool halls and the streets.  There may a new generation of Real Scientists educate them in the Precocious Faith of Our Fathers. 

 

The End.